Pierre Fresnay

Biography

Pierre Jules Louis Laudenbach was a French theatre and film actor.

During the 1920s, Fresnay appeared in many popular stage productions, most notably in the title role of Marcel Pagnol's Marius (1929), which ran for over 500 performances. His first great screen role was as Marius in the 1931 film adaptation of the play of the same name. He played the role again in the next two parts of Marcel Pagnol's Marseilles Trilogy, Fanny (1932) and César (1936).

He appeared in more than sixty films, eight of which were with Yvonne Printemps, with whom he lived since 1934. In that same year, he appeared in Alfred Hitchcock's first version of The Man Who Knew Too Much. In 1937 he portrayed the aristocratic French military officer Captain de Boeldieu in Jean Renoir's masterpiece La Grande Illusion.